'This post originally appeared on the Sales section of Inbound Hub. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales. Before you sell your thousandth customer, your hundredth customer, or even your tenth customer, you have to sell that crucial first customer. For a new startup with no case studies or testimonials at its disposal, this can be a daunting task. Aligned. Inbound Sales Daily

'Trends are signposts of the future: they point to where we’re headed. But the signposts are unreliable because trends are often interrupted – the classic example being the “ Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 ”, when experts predicted that major cities would soon be buried beneath horse droppings. This particular thought emerged quite unexpectedly during a vendor briefing yesterday.

'No matter how worthy your message, no matter how personally passionate or invested you are in what you’re promoting — even if it’s your product, book, service, or religion — you must always be acutely aware that you’re a guest. The thing about being in PR or marketing online is that no matter how pure your intentions, you will be scrutinized with skepticism. you protest.

'There will be a ton of ink (and cyber ink) dedicated to lead nurturing this year. Most of it will be about using marketing automation to nurture leads. In and of itself, marketing automation is not a bad thing. More accurately, it’s a good thing being used badly by most companies. But that’s not what this blog is about. Lead Nurturing
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'As Geddy Lee of Rush sang in the band’s 1981 hit Tom Sawyer , “changes aren’t permanent. But change is.” ” While he wasn’t referring to SEO (which wouldn’t really exist for another 16 years), the lyrics certainly apply. Image credit: Stone Temple Consulting. Search engine algorithms are constantly being updated. SEO practices which may be very effective one day are useless the next, and then actually invite penalties, before being once again ignored. So what’s an SEO professional to do? Guides to SEO for Beginners. by Forbes. The ultimate SEO 2.0
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'Regalix Research recently published their State of B2B Marketing 2015 report. The report detailed the budgets, priorities, digital and offline channels and the content preferences of B2B marketers. According to those who responded to the survey the top five objectives were as follows: Increase In Revenue: 67%. Increase Leads Generated: 65%. Increase in Sales: 63%. Increase in Customers Acquired: 59%. Improved Engagement/Customer Relationship: 55%. Does anyone else see a problem here? Marketers Are Still Struggling With Measurement & Analytics.
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'By Brooke Ballard, {grow} Contributing Columnist. Can deeper personal disclosure seduce silent social media lurkers into joining our conversation? Mark Schaefer and I have been on a seemingly endless quest to understand dark social media, gray social media , and the people who may love your company but stay in the shadows. But what if we’re focusing on the medium and not the message? If we can’t measure social media lurkers, maybe the content can draw them in. As Brian Solis famously said: Social media is about sociology not technology. BINGO. The Onion Theory. Cliché. Normal.
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